For years, critics have acclaimed the power of James Lee Burke's
writing, the luminosity of his prose, the psychological complexity of
his characters, the richness of his landscapes. Over the course of
twenty novels and one collection of short stories, he has developed a
loyal and dedicated following among both critics and general readers.
His thrillers, featuring either Louisiana cop Dave Robicheaux or Billy
Bob Holland, a hardened Texas-based lawyer, have consistently appeared
on national bestseller lists, making Burke one of America's most
celebrated authors of crime fiction.
Now, in a startling and
brilliantly successful departure, Burke has written a historical novel
-- an epic story of love, hate, and survival set against the tumultuous
background of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
At the center of
the novel are James Lee Burke's own ancestors, Robert Perry, who comes
from a slave-owning family of wealth and privilege, and Willie Burke,
born of Irish immigrants, a poor boy who is as irreverent as he is brave
and decent. Despite their personal and political conflicts with the
issues of the time, both men join the Confederate Army, choosing to face
ordeal by fire, yet determined not to back down in their commitment to
their moral beliefs, to their friends, and to the abolitionist woman
with whom both have become infatuated.
Against all local
law and customs, Flower learns from Willie to read and write, and
receives the help and protection of Abigail Dowling, a Massachusetts
abolitionist who had come south several years prior to help fight yellow
fever and never left, and who has attracted the eye of both Willie and
Robert Perry. These love affairs are not only fraught with danger, but
compromised by the great and grim events of the Civil War and its
aftermath.
Rounding
out this unforgettable cast of characters are Carrie LaRose, madam of
New Iberia's house of ill repute, and her ship's-captain brother
Jean-Jacques LaRose, Cajuns who assist Flower and Abigail in their
struggle to help the blacks of the town.
With battle scenes at
Shiloh and in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia that no reader will ever
forget, and set in a time of upheaval that affected all men and all
women at all levels of society, White Doves at Morning is an epic
worthy of America's most tragic conflict, as well as a book of
substance, importance, and genuine originality, one that will
undoubtedly come to be regarded as a masterpiece of historical fiction.
Chapter One: 1837
The black woman's name was
Sarie, and when she crashed out the door of the cabin at the end of the
slave quarters into the fading winter light, her lower belly bursting
with the child that had already broken her water, the aftermath of the
ice storm and the sheer desolate sweep of leaf-bare timber and frozen
cotton acreage and frost-limned cane stalks seemed to combine and strike
her face like a braided whip.
She trudged into the grayness of
the woods, the male shoes on her feet pocking the snow, her breath
streaming out of the blanket she wore on her head like a monk's cowl.
Ten minutes later, deep inside the gum and persimmon and oak trees, her
clothes strung with air vines that were silver with frost, the frozen
leaves cracking under her feet, she heard the barking of the dogs and
the yelps of their handlers who had just released them.
She
splashed into a slough, one that bled out of the woods into the dark
swirl of the river where it made a bend through the plantation. The ice
sawed at her ankles; the cold was like a hammer on her shins. But
nonetheless she worked her way upstream, between cypress roots that made
her think of a man's knuckles protruding from the shallows. Across the
river the sun was a vaporous smudge above the bluffs, and she realized
night would soon come upon her and that a level of coldness she had
never thought possible would invade her bones and womb and teats and
perhaps turn them to stone.
She clutched the bottom of her
stomach with both hands, as though holding a watermelon under her dress,
and slogged up the embankment and collapsed under a lean-to where, in
the summer months, an overseer napped in the afternoon while his charges
bladed down the cypress trees for the soft wood Marse Jamison used to
make cabinets in the big house on a bluff overlooking the river.
Even if she had known the river was called the Mississippi, the name
would have held no significance for her. But the water boundary called
the Ohio was another matter. It was somewhere to the north, somehow
associated in her mind with the Jordan, and a black person only needed
to wade across it to be as free as the children of Israel.
Except no black person on the plantation could tell her exactly how far
to the north this river was, and she had learned long ago never to ask a
white person where the river called Ohio was located.
The light
in the west died and through the breaks in the lean-to she saw the moon
rising and the ground fog disappearing in the cold, exposing the
hardness of the earth, the glazed and speckled symmetry of the tree
trunks. Then a pain like an ax blade seemed to split her in half and she
put a stick in her mouth to keep from crying out. As the time between
the contractions shrank and she felt blood issue from her womb between
her fingers, she was convinced the juju woman had been right, that this
baby, her first, was a man-child, a warrior and a king.
She
stared upward at the constellations bursting in the sky, and when she
shut her eyes she saw her child inside the redness behind her eyelids, a
powerful little brown boy with liquid eyes and a mouth that would seek
both milk and power from his mother's breast.
She caught the
baby in her palms and sawed the cord in half with a stone and tied it in
a knot, then pressed the closed eyes and hungry mouth to her teat, just
before passing out.
The dawn broke hard and cold, a yellow
light that burst inside the woods and exposed her hiding place and
brought no warmth or release from the misery in her bones. There was a
dirty stench in the air, like smoke from a drowned campfire. She heard
the dogs again, and when she rose to her feet the pain inside her told
her she would never outrun them.
Learn from critters, her mother
had always said. They know God's way. Don't never ax Master or his
family or the mens he hire to tell you the troot. Whatever they teach us
is wrong, girl. Never forget that lesson, her mother had said.
The doe always leads the hunter away from the fawn, Sarie thought. That's what God taught the doe, her mother had said.
She wrapped the baby in the blanket that had been her only protection
from the cold, then rose to her feet and covered the opening to the
lean-to with a broken pine bough and walked slowly through the woods to
the slough. She stepped into the water, felt it rush inside her shoes
and over her ankles, then worked her way downstream toward the river. In
the distance she heard axes knocking into wood and smelled smoke from a
stump fire, and the fact that the work of the plantation went on
rhythmically, not missing a beat, in spite of her child's birth and
possible death reminded her once again of her own insignificance and the
words Master had used to her yesterday afternoon.
"You should
have taken care of yourself, Sarie," he had said, his pantaloons tucked
inside his riding boots, his youthful face undisturbed and serene and
without blemish except for the tiny lump of tobacco in his jaw. "I'll
see to it the baby doesn't lack for raiment or provender, but I'll have
to send you to the auction house. You're not an ordinary nigger, Sarie.
You won't be anything but trouble. I'm sorry it worked out this way."
When she came out of the water and labored toward the edge of the
woods, she glanced behind her and in the thin patina of snow frozen on
the ground she saw her own blood spore and knew it was almost her time,
the last day in a lifetime of days that had been marked by neither hope
nor despair but only unanswered questions: Where was the green place
they had all come from? What group of men had made them chattel to be
treated as though they had no souls, whipped, worked from cain't-see to
cain't-see, sometimes branded and hamstrung?
The barking of the
dogs was louder now but she no longer cared about either the dogs or the
men who rode behind them. Her spore ended at the slough; her story
would end here, too. The child was another matter. She touched the juju
bag tied around her neck and prayed she and the child would be together
by nightfall, in the warm, green place where lions lay on the beaches by
a great sea.
But now she was too tired to think about any of
it. She stood on the edge of the trees, the sunlight breaking on her
face, then sat down heavily in the grass, the tops of her shoes dark
with her blood. Through a red haze she saw a man in a stovepipe hat and
dirty white breeches ride over a hillock behind his dogs, two other
mounted men behind him, their horses steaming in the sunshine.
The dogs surrounded her, circling, snuffing in the grass, their bodies
bumping against one another, but they made no move against her person.
The man in the stovepipe hat reined his horse and got down and looked
with exasperation at his two companions. "Get these dogs out of here. If
I hear that barking anymore, I'll need a new pair of ears," he said.
Then he looked down at Sarie, almost respectfully. "You gave us quite a
run."
She did not reply. His name was Rufus Atkins, a slight,
hard-bodied man whose skin, even in winter, had the color and texture of
a blacksmith's leather apron. His hair was a blackish-tan, long, combed
straight back, and there were hollows in his cheeks that gave his face a
certain fragility. But the cartilage around the jawbones was
unnaturally dark, as though rubbed with blackened brick dust, knotted
with a tension his manner hid from others.
Rufus Atkins' eyes
were flat, hazel, and rarely did they contain or reveal any definable
emotion, as though he lived behind glass and the external world never
registered in a personal way on his senses.
A second man
dismounted, this one blond, his nose wind-burned, wearing a leather cap
and canvas coat and a red-and-white-checkered scarf tied around his
throat. On his hip he carried a small flintlock pistol that had three
hand-smoothed indentations notched in the wood grips. In his right hand
he gripped a horse quirt that was weighted with a lead ball sewn inside
the bottom of the deerhide handle.
"She done dropped it, huh?" he said.
"That's keenly observant of you, Clay, seeing as how the woman's belly
is flat as a busted pig's bladder," Rufus Atkins replied.
"Marse
Jamison says find both of them, he means find both of them, Rufus," the
man named Clay said, looking back into the trees at the blood spots in
the snow.
Rufus Atkins squatted down and ignored his companion's observation, his eyes wandering over Sarie's face.
"They say you filed your teeth into points 'cause there's an African
king back there in your bloodline somewhere," he said to her. "Bet you
gave birth to a man-child, didn't you, Sarie?"
"My child and me gonna be free. Ain't your bidness no more, Marse Rufus," she replied.
"Might as well face it, Sarie. That baby is not going to grow up around
here, not with Marse Jamison's face on it. He'll ship it off somewhere
he doesn't have to study on the trouble that big dick of his gets him
into. Tell us where the baby is and maybe you and it will get sold off
together."
When she didn't reply to his lie, he lifted her chin
with his knuckle. "I've been good to you, Sarie. Never made you lift
your dress, never whipped you, always let you go to the corn-breaks and
the dances. Isn't it time for a little gratitude?" he said.
She
looked into the distance at the bluffs on the far side of the river, the
steam rising off the water in the shadows below, the live oaks blowing
stiffly against the sky. Rufus Atkins fitted his hand under her arm and
began to lift her to her feet.
She seized his wrist and sunk her
teeth into his hand, biting down with her incisors into sinew and vein
and bone, seeing his head pitch back, hearing the squeal rise from his
throat. Then she flung his hand away from her and spat his blood out of
her mouth.
He staggered to his feet, gripping the back of his wounded hand.
"You nigger bitch," he said.
He ripped the quirt from his friend's grasp and struck her across the
face with it. Then, as though his anger were insatiable and fed upon
itself, he inverted the quirt in his hand and whipped the leaded end
down on her head and neck and shoulders, again and again.
He threw the quirt to the ground, squeezing his wounded hand again, and made a grinding sound with his teeth.
"Damn, I think she went to the bone," he said.
"Rufus?" the blond man named Clay said.
"What?" he answered irritably.
"I think you just beat her brains out."
"She deserved it."
"No, I mean you beat her brains out. Look. She's probably spreading her legs for the devil now," the blond man said.
Rufus Atkins stared down at Sarie's slumped posture, the hanging jaw, the sightless eyes.
"You just cost Marse Jamison six hundred dollars. You flat put us in it, Roof," Clay said.
Rufus cupped his mouth in hand and thought for a minute. He turned and
looked at the third member of their party, a rodent-faced man in a
buttoned green wool coat and slouch hat strung with a turkey feather. He
had sores on his face that never healed, breath that stunk of decaying
teeth, and no work history other than riding with the paddy rollers, a
ubiquitous crew of drunkards and white trash who worked as police for
plantation interests and terrorized Negroes on the roads at night.
"What you aim to do?" Clay asked.
"I'm studying on it," Rufus replied. He then turned toward the third
man. "Come on up here, Jackson, and give us your opinion on something,"
he said.
The third man approached them, the wind twirling the
turkey feather on his hat brim. He glanced down at Sarie, then back at
Rufus, a growing knowledge in his face.
"You done it. You dig the hole," he said.
"You got it all wrong," Rufus said.
He slipped the flintlock pistol from Clay's side holster, cocked it,
and fired a chunk of lead the size of a walnut into the side of
Jackson's head. The report echoed across the water against the bluffs on
the far side.
"Good God, you done lost your mind?" Clay said.
"Sarie killed Jackson, Clay. That's the story you take to the grave.
Nigger who kills a white man isn't worth six hundred dollars. Nigger who
kills a white man buys the scaffold. That's Lou'sana law," he said.
The blond man, whose full name was Clay Hatcher, stood stupefied, his
nose red in the cold, his breath loud inside his checkered scarf.
"Whoever made the world sure didn't care much about the likes of us,
did He?" Rufus said to no one in particular. "Bring up Jackson's horse
and get him across the saddle, would you? Best be careful. I think he
messed himself."
After she was told of her daughter's death
and the baby who had been abandoned somewhere deep in the woods, Sarie's
mother left her job in the washhouse without permission and went to the
site where her daughter had died. She followed the blood trail back to
the slough, then stood on the thawing mudflat and watched the water
coursing southward toward the river and knew which direction Sarie had
been going when she had finally been forced to stop and give birth to
her child. It had been north, toward the river called the Ohio.
Sarie's mother and a wet nurse with breasts that hung inside her shirt
like swollen eggplants walked along the banks of the slough until late
afternoon. The sun was warm now, the trees filled with a smoky yellow
light, as though the ice storm had never passed through Ira Jamison's
plantation. Sarie's mother and the wet nurse rounded a bend in the
woods, then saw footprints leading up to a leafy bower and a lean-to
whose opening was covered with a bright green branch from a slash pine.
The child lay wrapped in a blanket like a caterpillar inside a cocoon,
the eyes shut, the mouth puckered. The ground was soft now, scattered
with pine needles, and among the pine needles were wildflowers that had
been buried under snow. Sarie's mother unwrapped the child from the
blanket and wiped it clean with a cloth, then handed it to the wet
nurse, who held the baby's mouth to her breast and covered it with her
coat.
"Sarie wanted a man-child. But this li'l girl beautiful," the wet nurse said.
"She gonna be my darlin' thing, too. Sarie gonna live inside her. Her
name gonna be Spring. No, that ain't right. Her name gonna be Flower,"
Sarie's mother said.
Copyright © 2002 by James Lee Burke
The heroes of James Lee Burke's fascinating novel of the Civil
War and Reconstruction are two of his own ancestors--Robert Perry and
Willie Burke, both Confederate soldiers. Willie seems to be Burke's own
voice in the novel, that of a reluctant fighter torn between his
opposition to slavery and his loyalty to his Louisiana home. The two
men's lives intertwine with those of Abigail Dowling, an abolitionist;
Flower Jamison, a slave fathered by plantation owner Ira Jamison; and
Rufus Atkins, a violent overseer who finds outlets for his hatred in
both eras. Will Patton captures the dialects perfectly, with a voice
laced with tension even as it lingers over the smallest details. J.A.S.
© AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
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